Plans2Reality

How Apple beat IBM in Steve Jobs' first retail war • The Register

You really want to read this article, and not just because it is pro-Apple. There are two excellent marketing points in it, and an example of why the even biggest company needs to be flexible enough to get something out the door in 48 hours - over a weekend.

The Golden Age of Computer Sales surely must have been Christmas 1984. The Macintosh had just been released, Compaq and IBM offered powerful new CPUs, but the real action was a massive Christmas sales battle between the Apple//c and the IBM PCjr. I remember it well, I was working at ComputerLand in Los Angeles, and I was at the very center of the battle.

via www.theregister.co.uk

Well, this is different, all right.....

Stunt Riders with a difference

LED lamps for the home - an update from Electronica

We were pleased to see a large number of firms exhibiting LED lamps for use in home and business. Many are designed to fit into existing lamps, i.e. they have Edison-base contacts, like regular lightbulbs.

Our past experience with LED lamps has been mixed. We've seen too many failures, too soon. We suspect the culprit is the power supply, not the LED itself. Many of these power supplies use electrolytic capacitors. There is nothing wrong with this per se, except that few electrolytic capacitors can handle the heat. Thus, the capacitor fails and the lamp is dead.

Some vendors seem to be aware of this. We plan to evaluate some units and report. Stay tuned.

Motion Control

Otherwise known as tiny motors. Well, not _that_ tiny, but... Trinamic makes a number of very innovative ICs for stepper motors and also brushless DC motors. They sell development kits (also great for us hobbyist/hackers). 

Also cool, in the literal sense, is the drive technology they used. Your faithful correspondent, way back in the dim dark ages of the 70s, designed stepper motor controllers. Low power warn't in the balance, as they say, but Trinamic makes controllers that let the motors stay cool enough to not affect biological or medical test samples, for example.

Kinect for X-Box 360 Rocks!

We had a chance to play some video games using the new Kinect accessory for the X-Box 360. I'm sure their marketing people hate the comparison, but it's like the Wii, only you don't have to hold anything. It totally rocks as a game and a fitness platform.

Buy one!

Plug Computing

Marvell has developed a new small "wall wart" computing platform. It's basically an ARM processor in a d*mn small box, with full networking and file service. Your own cloud, as it were.

Seagate has already introduced what must be the world's smallest NAS. Ionics is selling several varieties of hardware module based on it, in support of the developer community.

It's a cliche, but the possibilities are endless.

Electronica Preview

Plans2Reality is attending Electronica 2010 in Munich. I'll be blogging about interesting bits of technology as well as business news, and such other bits as seem interesting. Hard news will be left to the more-mainstream press.

We are especially on the lookout for new LED products that can be used in home lighting. In the future we look toward a house plumbed with cat-5 and PoE, using the PoE for most lighting and all remote control. Higher-power devices will still need 120/240VAC, but more and more we will need less and less of that.

Green the right way.

Stay tuned.

DITA - XML and more for tech pubs

If you create text-oriented content, especially on a large scale, this may be of interest to you:

http://www.intelligentcontent2011.com/

 

No, not Dita vonTeese. Though puttiing her name in this post may increase my page hits.  ;-)

Driving the Design Win Process

This blog began as a somewhat gadget-driven blog, but I am not receiving enough free gadgets in the mail, ;-)  so I am going to broaden the scope, to include topics surrounding effective and CLEAR communications. There will be emphasis on technology, but also on communication about technology. After all, if you can't explain it... well, you get the idea.

Many technology companies measure sales (in part) by the number of design wins. So...

- What is a Design Win?  (And what isn't?)

- How do you know when you have one?

- How do you get them?

Spring

The season and the mechanical device. I can't quite beleive I haven't posted since February. After a slow winter, business activity has increased. It seems as though there was a sort of pause last fall, waiting for the other shoe (or bank) to drop. Now, while we are by no means out of the woods, business activity is increasing again.

So, here at Plans2Reality we are springing forward as well. We've expanded our offices and our service offerings. There's increased emphasis on what I call 'Driving the Design Win Process' as we help our clients close the technology design wins they need to drive sales.

Got Design Wins?